Reportedly, thismissingpersons report from Leesburg, Virginia has turned out for the worst. My condolences to loved ones, and anyone else who he knows or has touched in life.

And here I’m in an odd position. Google his name, and right at the top… you get a page from this blog, out of the Larouche Challenge. After this I do become a little glib in dropping his name for generalized crankiness — in much the same manner I might with, oh, Bill Kristol. It’s fair to say I have my political disagreements with him. What can one say when a simple google search finds that his most read piece of work appears to be an article entitled “The Satanic Origins of Rock”?

But that’s one noteworthy thing on Don Phau. I can identify him cleanly and clearly with a contentious domestic political cause — a cause here molded a bit too much to the fit the pillars of Larouche’s ideology [and sure, I’m being generous] — I suppose carrying out of its Marxian roots the War against Bourgeois Culture and on into various permetations of an axis fitting small “c” conservative “soccer mom” “It Takes a Village” / “Raising PG Kids in an R Rated World” concerns to a more right wing Moral Majority banner… which, for that matter, taps into a strain of youth angst — the corrupting of American Youth through Mass Popular Culture. In the 80s, he wrote and made spot media and legislative appearances to decry the theatrics of heavy metal, and launches from there to the myriad of moral panics of youth. (The Beastialization of Man? The Beatl-ization of Man!) As the 90s pass and we enter a new millennium, the conern over school shootings collides with searching violent video games as a chief cause. Which, for better or worse, slides him right into right into a spittoon for online gamer culture when his writings slide into the edge of the mainstream (or, for that matter, when they don’t) — though, Helga Zepp remained a more visible focus.

I suppose it’s to his credit that I can identify a political angle off of Don Phau, beyond “Larouche”. But regardless of everything, (and I’m not sugar-coating what he did in the cult, see here for Don Phau circa 1972) condolences.